


Stronghold

by Ranni



Category: Avengers, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Avengers Feels, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Clint Barton Needs a Hug, Codependency, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Illness, Natasha Romanov Feels, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Natasha Romanov Needs a Hug, No Thor today/sorry Thor, POV Natasha Romanov, Phil Coulson Has the Patience of a Saint, Phil Coulson is still fake dead, Protective Nastasha Romanov, Protective Steve Rogers, Protective Tony Stark, Road Rage, Sick Clint Barton, Sick Fic, Team as Family, Tony Stark Has A Heart, depressive behavior
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-27
Updated: 2018-01-27
Packaged: 2019-03-08 23:31:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13468920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ranni/pseuds/Ranni
Summary: Tony leaves forty-seven messages of escalating anger while Steve just leaves variations on one central theme. Bruce is still too angry to reach out at all. Natasha skims them all briefly before destroying the phone. She and Clint will have to move on; the team will undoubtedly show up soon, and the assassins have a few more stops to make on their farewell tour.—or—Another sickfic as Natasha and Clint close down their various safehouses across the country.





	Stronghold

 

*******

“Let me merge, you shithead, or I’ll cram that Patriots flag straight up your peehole!”  
   
Anyone else might think that he was angry, but she’s known him long enough to know that the truly angry Clint is a silent, seething thing, and that this trash talking one is actually the happy version. Natasha is used to it, but it had certainly come as quite a shock to Bruce, who had aborted the one and only car trip he ever attempted with them, and to Steve, who’s always offended on every other driver’s behalf. Tony, of course, loves and encourages every second of Clint’s faux road rage—the two of them in a car together can be rather unbearable for anyone else.  
   
“Oh, _that’s_ nice. Real classy, Lady! And of _course_ she has one of those stupid—” His voice drops into a threatening growl, and he all but bares his teeth at the minivan driver as he rockets past; Clint takes inexplicable offense to the cutesy sticker families adorning so many back windshields these days.  
   
Natasha ignores him, wishing for the umpteenth time that she could read in the car, but the combination of rushing scenery and Barton’s aggressive driving always gives her a headache. She watches the billboards instead, on the search for anything interesting, the kind of attractions they never had time to stop and gawk at before. So far they’ve been to a washing machine museum, a UFO museum that consisted mostly of paranoid drawings, and a ‘dog zoo’ that was really just the gated yard of a very enterprising animal hoarder. There haven’t been any good signs lately, just a sad mix of proclamations that “JESUS SAVES”, vastly outnumbered by sleazy ads for gentlemens’ clubs.  
   
“Get off the phone, you shit-heeled hillbilly bastard!” Clint jabs a finger against the window. “I swear, if cars came equipped with rocket launchers my life would be _so_ much better.”  
   
They pass an abandoned, skeletal amusement park. They had gone to one with Phil a few months before he died, riding go-karts and bumper boats and only leaving when a half drunk Clint started wondering aloud how high he could climb the side of the roller coaster before someone caught him. That day had been one of the happiest of Natasha’s life, and she still has the flag that she liberated from her go-cart, stuffed away in one of her lockboxes. The one in the Nebraska house maybe. Or possibly in Santa Fe. She’ll find out soon enough.  
   
“Fuuuuuuuuuckfaaaaaace!” Clint screams at a silver Audi, the Midwestern bray he reserves for special occasions giving the word about four extra syllables, and Natasha can’t help but laugh.  
   
He’s in a good mood for the first time in months; the road rage proves it. Maybe this trip will be positive for both of them. Maybe he’ll feel a bit brighter about things when they go back. If they go back.

 

*******  
   
The first house they reach is also the first they ever bought. It’s actually a double-wide trailer with aspirations—remodeled to become landlocked and more energy efficient, perhaps, but a double wide trailer it will always technically be. _That’s really to our benefit, when it comes to property taxes_ , Clint said at the time. He’d lived hand to mouth for so long that he was obsessed with stretching every dollar, and does so even now, when he no longer needs to.  
   
Neither of them have been here for years, but the person they hired to maintain the yard and gravel road has done a decent job, and it’s all nondescript enough to avoid attracting notice. Natasha flips on the faucets and they sputter brown water for a good while but otherwise work fine. Clint opens cabinets that are stocked in the same way as all of their safehouses—canned fruit, meat, vegetables. Airtight canisters full of dried beans and oats.  
   
Natasha leaves him to check the house over for any needed repairs and drives to the nearest town, picks up a few pieces of fresh fruit—she’s already sick of fast food—and finds a real estate agent. He’s helpful and eager and Natasha gives him a spare key, a bank account number, and assurances that selling the property is more important than getting top dollar for it. In time she’ll provide some electronic signatures, money will appear in the account, and the safehouse will wink right out of their lives. Their first stronghold, just a ramshackle little thing with illusions of being something grander.  
   
The timing may not be ideal, but it’s good that they’re doing this. SHIELD is gone and their lives are a lot simpler; they don’t really _need_ so many hideouts anymore. Setting up dummy accounts for each to automatically pay utilities, coordinating caretakers to check on roofs and foundations and keep the grass mowed—it’s reassuring, of course, but also a gigantic pain in the ass. They own everything outright, but taxes and upkeep took a sizable chunk out of both of their paychecks, and Natasha always found it more than a little ironic that she couldn’t afford even a terrible apartment in the city because she co-owned too many unused properties.  
   
It’s evening before she gets back to the house. Clint has been busy; everything is moderately dust-free and all the canned food is in trash bags, ready to be put out when they leave. From the scattered cleaning supplies she can almost reconstruct his movements around the kitchen and identify the exact moment he had to stop—an upper cabinet door hangs open, one lonely little can of green beans still on the shelf.

 

*******

He’s still sleeping on the couch when Natasha works a baseboard carefully away from the bathroom wall. She reaches blindly into the open space with a fleeting hope that nothing with too many legs brushes against her hand, relieved to feel only a sharp metal corner instead. She pulls the box out and closes her eyes for a moment in anticipation before opening it.  
   
It’s one of the emptier ones, being so old. There’s an envelope of cash that she pockets absently, and a small, blue rubber ball.  
   
She and Clint had wiled away countless hours on quinjets throwing rubber balls around, zooming them as close as possible to Phil’s head as he studiously ignored them. They’d bounce them off the bulkheads for the other to catch, the throws growing more and more complicated, or toss them back as forth as they waited for marks to show, extraction teams to show, for Phil to call, for the next thing to happen. Those days are long gone now; they don’t play those games any more.  
   
Natasha unconsciously pulls the ball toward her chest, and then notices the torn ticket stub that had been hiding underneath. Her heart skips a little because she’d almost forgotten that day, her first birthday with Team Delta and their cringeworthy, if well intentioned, present. It’s been locked away so long that it’s stuck to the metal but Natasha pries the ticket up, can hear Clint saying _We know you like dancing, so...There’s this thing in town; I hope it’s right._  
   
Phil Coulson looked like he had a headache that grew with every metal tap of toes on the wooden floor—Natasha was sure he’d die of an aneurysm before the show was through. His face remained perfectly neutral and polite, every inch the gentleman, but he consulted the wrinkled program his hands constantly, trying to determine how much longer the torture would last. His eyes glazed over as his mind retreated into the safety of meeting agendas, running through checklists of things undone.  
   
Clint knew that he should hate “Riverdance” every bit as much as his hero, but the circus performer in him always enjoyed any spectacle or over the top showmanship. After a fraught half hour of trying to play it cool, Clint finally gave up and let himself be openly charmed by the whole thing.

Natasha watched their faces more than the show.

 

*******

She scrolls through her phone, skimming the news. Disasters abound, but the Avengers don’t appear anywhere. Maybe they can’t respond effectively, with two Avengers gone AWOL and Bruce always reluctant to participate. The team probably won’t break up dramatically if she and Clint don’t go back, but they might fade into the background, be something that just used to exist for awhile, a thing Tony Stark used to do before he went back to business full time, an old idea people bring up now and then in conversation.  
   
_Whatever happened to those Avengers?_ she imagines them asking. _Remember them? Iron Man. Captain America. Thor. The Hulk._  Oh yeah. And the other ones. _The chick that always wore black. The bow and arrow guy._  
   
Natasha swipes all the news stories away, loving how easy it is to ignore things she doesn’t want to see, and turns back to her meatloaf, which is almost tasteless, even drowning in ketchup. Clint sighs loudly and tears at his napkin. He'd spent the last thirty miles driving her crazy in anticipation of diner pie and coffee but now, faced with his heart’s desire, he just picks at it, dragging his fork back and forth through the cherry juice until it resembles a tiny crime scene.  
   
“So, what’s new in the big, bad world?” he asks. His own phone is stuffed into his suitcase, hidden amongst his socks.  
   
“I don’t know; I was checking to see if they announced the Emmy nominees yet.”  
   
He’s undoubtedly curious about the team as well, but Natasha wants to keep up this distance between them, for now. Everyone had been so angry at the end, and he had been so happy at the beginning of this trip—that all means something, even if she’s not sure exactly what.  
   
“Oh.” Clint gives up and pushes his plate away for the waitress to pick up on her next pass. “Well. Have they?”  
   
“No.” She wipes her fingers down the condensation on her water glass, leaving what looks like dripping claw marks behind. “Not yet.”

 

*******

Then they hit Kentucky, and the dread sinks in, because he’ll almost certainly want to visit John Scheurer. Natasha doesn’t want to, at _all_ , but can hardly say that to Clint, who probably doesn’t really want to go either. She doesn’t make him ask, just gets on the highway that will take them there.  
   
John was Clint’s third or fourth partner at SHIELD and had gotten shot on the job. Initially it seemed like he was going to recover fine, but one stroke in the hospital later and he wasn’t ever going to be fine again. He and Clint weren’t terribly close, but the archer is unfailingly loyal, and visits every few months.  
   
Natasha hangs back uncomfortably—John was from before her time, she only knows him this way, or from Clint’s pictures, where they’re both healthy and grinning. She can never understand his slurred speech, but Clint always seems to, rambling endlessly about the people that John knew at SHIELD that are still around—a list that grows shorter and shorter every year that passes. Clint doesn’t mention the fall of SHIELD, and she wonders if John even knows.  
   
“Well, we’d better head out,” Clint says finally, to her extreme relief. “We’re seeing the sights, wrapping up some loose ends.” John mumbles something and Clint laughs. “I don't think so. Maybe. We’ll see.”  
   
“It was nice to see you again,” Natasha lies, wondering if she should shake his hand, hesitating a moment too long and missing the proper moment. Clint covers the awkwardness easily by leaning forward and hugging his friend carefully around the shoulders.  
   
“Is there anything else I can do for you, John?”  
   
He always asks that, and she always thought it was a throwaway question, just part of their unique goodbye ritual. For the first time she hears it differently, a way he might have always intended but she can only now identify—an extra meaning to the words, a way out for a former brother in arms.

When they get back in the car Clint doesn’t offer to drive, sleeps instead of yelling at everyone on the highway.

 

*******

Clint is outside gutting the condenser, hoping to resurrect the air conditioning, while Natasha stays inside and sweats, pulling a metal box from the crawlspace in the attic. This one is full; she’s been to the Kentucky house more times than any of the others.  
   
There’s a post-it note with Maria Hill’s phone number— _Call me...we’ll go get pedicures or something, get away from all this testosterone_. Her first female friend and non-Clint non-Phil friend. A piece of rubble from the shawarma shop. A ballpoint pen—one of the larger items she’d ever swiped, and the stupid thing is even monogrammed.  
   
When she had told him, Clint laughed at her, and she _hated_ when people did that, but there was something about his laugh, genuine and a little goofy sounding, that always made her smile back, even when she was angry—which was  _all_ the time in those early days.  
   
“You’re still stuck in the Psych cycle? Natasha, _really_.” He shook his head and laughed again. “Come close, little spy, and Uncle Hawkeye will tell you the secret.”  
   
“As if _you_ could ever teach _me_ anything.” Those automatic, prickly reactions had already made her incredibly unpopular at SHIELD, but Clint was almost immune to her derision. He nudged her good naturedly with his shoulder, and when she instinctively elbowed him back sharply in the ribs he just grimaced and rubbed at the spot, then deliberately nudged her again.   
   
“All you have to do is cry.”  
   
She glared at him.  
   
“Look, they’re gonna keep pushing. So you cry, they decide you’ve had a breakthrough, and then they lay off.” He dusted his hands together showily.  
   
“I’m not crying just to get out of therapy.” She wasn’t sure if she even _could_ cry anymore, not for real at least. And she certainly wasn’t going to try it in front of that idiotic counselor, who had seascape prints— _prints_ , not even real paintings—all over the walls, as if they would make up for a complete lack of windows.  
   
Clint waved dismissively. “Oh come on, it’s _easy_ ; I do it all the time—whenever Phil gets all twisted up and worried about something and makes me go to therapy. You can’t do it right away, though; you’ve gotta settle in for a few appointments first. Just look kind of sad, then open up just a tiny bit more each time. Give them some tender morsels about how mean people are, how much everything hurts. Do that for three or four weeks, and then...the grand finale!” He furrowed his eyebrows and his mouth twitched even more downward than normal as he made an odd sound in the back of his throat.  
   
“What are you—“  
   
His shoulders jerked and there was a louder choked noise.  
   
“You aren’t. You’re _not_.”  
   
But damned if he wasn’t. Somehow he even managed to produce two or three manly tears, dripping down perfectly past the fingers covering his face. “Oh, God....my childhood was just...so...HORRIBLE!” His breath hitched a few times, and his body practically crumpled in on itself, a picture of abject misery.  
   
“Alright, alright, you’ve made your point!” She pulled at his hands and he let them be moved away, revealing the delighted expression underneath.  
   
“You have to go one more time after you cry, so that you can look so much better, and the doc can preen at their success and feel all validated and shit.” He dabbed a tear out of his left eye and pointed the glistening fingertip at her triumphantly. _See how easy it is?_  
   
“And you’re _sure_ this is going to work?” She’s had similar performances in front of marks; it should present no real problem. The most worrisome part is that she couldn’t very well kill the counselor afterwards, that the woman would write it down—‘ _and then the Black Widow cried’_ —and someone would read it. Someone like Phil, who would feel justified in sending her, might even do it again.  
   
“It’s worked for me for years,” Clint promised. “And if you can act a little raw afterward, more’s the better; Phil will be extra nice to you. One time he even gave me a present.” His expression dissolved into something a little sad before he shook himself, brightening again. “The point is that they lay off for awhile. It’ll buy you six Psych-free months at least.”  
   
“The whole thing is ridiculous. He’s ridiculous for insisting upon it, and you’re even more foolish by playing the game.”  
   
He shrugged and they went back to cleaning their weapons. He was practiced and efficient, but Natasha made sure that she was faster, that she completed each step just before he did. It was important to be the best, and that he never challenged the idea made no difference. She _needed_  to be faster.  
   
Clint laid his tools carefully out on the white cloth, tapping at one minutely with an uncharacteristic fussiness, until it lined up perfectly with the others. “Look,” he said suddenly, the words cutting into the silence like a knife slash, “let him think it, okay? Let Phil think he’s helping."  
   
"Why." Making Phil Coulson feel good about himself wasn't high on her priority list.  
   
"He needs to. _We_ need him to.” He turned to face her, his eyes unhappy, no trace of the carefree dramatics of before. “It's important that he thinks that it’s not too late to fix us; that we can still be saved. It doesn't diminish either of us to let him believe that.”  
   
Clint Barton sat by her at meals, saved her a seat at trainings and meetings and presentations, knocked on her door and asked if she wanted to exercise, see movies, run to convenience stores. He’d made a place for her at SHIELD and in all of the places that came after and Natasha felt a sort of devotion to him for that. Maybe it was even a friendship; she didn’t have enough experience to know for sure.  
   
What she felt for Phil was more complicated, and yet simpler in some ways. She followed his orders, and that was the easy part, because he was a good man. But Phil had the unenviable task of encouraging their depravity in the field and spending every other hour trying to temper and gentle it, as if they were dogs that he threw into fighting pits by day and then tried to cuddle at night. Phil needed to believe that there was no toll, that their reality could be shaped with caring words and visits to Psych, that what the three of them did not accumulate into an irreconcilable cosmic debt.  
   
Natasha knew better. And so did Clint.  
   
But a week later she went to Psych and cried, blew her nose daintily and nodded as the counselor talked earnestly about breakthroughs and walls and moving forward and blah and blah and blah. The woman beamed as she scribbled her notes, then hugged Natasha goodbye. She never even noticed the stolen pen.

 

*******

There’s no way Tony should be able to get her cell phone number, but of course he had no problem doing so, has been calling it obsessively since the day they left. When the phone suddenly springs to life again on the kitchen counter she ignores it, standing by the window to keep an eye on Clint, who’s swearing loudly and battling an impressive mud dauber nest hanging off the detached garage.  
   
The phone is silenced, but still lights up obnoxiously with every call, buzzes a little on the counter. It lights up again, and makes a series of loud, odd clicks before Tony’s voice is somehow screaming out over the tinny speakers.

“Pick _up_ , damnit! I know you can hear me, you fuckers!”  
   
Natasha sighs and retrieves the phone, goes back to the window. Clint is covering his mouth and nose with one arm and spraying an aerosol can haphazardly at the wasp nest. She’s a little surprised he didn’t just nail it an exploding arrow, but the day is still young. “What do you want, Tony?”  
   
“Forty. Seven.” He sounds pissed, but that’s a good thing. An angry Tony Stark is easily managed.  
   
“And _that_ means...?”  
   
“I’ve left forty-seven messages on your stupid stone aged phone—don’t even ask how many I’ve left on his—and not one answer from either of you. It’s been _weeks_ , Romanov!”  
   
“Holy hyperbole, Iron Man—it’s only been ten days.” There’s hardly any point in antagonizing Stark if she can’t be there in person to enjoy his red-faced, blustery reactions, but she can imagine them very well.  
   
“Yeah. Ten days. Ten days when we could have been proactive, coming at this thing head-on, figuring it out. Instead you both run away, and this is dangerous and stupid and I won’t—“  
   
“We’re taking care of personal business. Private business.” That will never be enough to dissuade Tony’s interference, not in the slightest, but she knows something that will. “Yesterday we went to visit John Scheurer."  
   
Tony immediately falls silent, and Natasha doesn’t bother to suppress the bitter smile that crosses her face. Clint was pretty closed mouthed in the early days of the team and Stark far too nosy to bear the archer's occasional disappearances. Iron Man suddenly landing in the lobby of a SHIELD-affiliated nursing home had been dramatic enough all on its own, but nothing compared to the epic shitstorm that followed. Clint was beyond furious, and only Tony’s sincere contrition had made any reconciliation possible. Natasha had thoroughly enjoyed the whole affair, especially the shouting, because the only thing she loved more than a righteously angry Clint Barton was a shamefaced Tony Stark.  
   
She’s enjoying a long sip of his delicious unease when it is ruined by, “Well, hey, maybe he and Clint can room together, at the end.”  
   
“Fuck you,” she snarls, and that’s a slip, a bad one. It’s embarrassing to be goaded into an emotional reaction by Stark, of all people.  
   
“Natasha, come back.” Tony sounds so unhappy. Worried. _Truly_ worried, and not the dismissive, hand waving _I’m a superhero so I am forced to save about the world, but I really can’t be bothered_ persona he’s carefully cultivated and tries to pretend is real. “Tell me that you’re coming back. I know that you guys both need some time to deal with—“  
   
It looks like Clint is winning the wasp war, and that’s a good thing, since they’ll need to leave sooner rather than later. There won’t be any lingering or silly sightseeing this time, not with Tony suddenly breathing down their necks. “You’re right," Natasha agrees. "There _is_ something we need to deal with. There’s kind of a bug issue going on around here.”  
   
“Let me talk to Clint,” he demands suddenly. “I want to talk to him right _now_.”  
   
“He’s busy. With the bugs, you know. I probably should go help him, actually, much as I do enjoy these little tete-à-tetes.”  
   
“Natasha.”  
   
“Don’t do this again,” she says, abandoning the easy tone and letting the Black Widow out. “You contact me, or him, and we’ll drop so far out of your reach that your pet computer could look for a hundred thousand years and never come close. So if you can’t rein in your own goddamned impulses then get one of the others to do it, but _don’t_ hijack this phone again, and don’t you _dare_  show up here, or anywhere else that we are. Leave us alone.”

 

*******

Later, when Clint goes to bed—early, way too early—Natasha checks her messages for the first time. There are, as promised, forty-seven from Tony; eighteen increasingly upset voicemails and twenty-nine texts that begin innocently enough and cycle through threats and apologies.  
   
_Where r u 2???_  
   
_pick up the phone natasha you bitch_  
   
_Sorry about the bitch thing pls come home_  
   
“Sorry, Stark.” It’s going to really hurt him if they don’t come back, and she’s pretty certain now that they won’t. She deletes the last of his entreaties—a new one has already appeared—without looking at it. “That’s the way it goes, sometimes.”  
   
There is nothing from Bruce; maybe Clint has some messages on his phone, but she doubts it. Banner had reacted with an anger that was unusual, even for him. While Steve diplomatically admonished and Tony fretted, Bruce went straight into a nuclear rage, calling Clint every English synonym for  _stupid_ and _selfish_ , maybe even inventing a few new ones.  
   
“You know, Bruce, I bet you sounded exactly like your dad just then,” Clint bit back, going for the throat.  
   
Tony and Steve had pulled them apart immediately, Steve’s arms preemptively around Bruce, Tony pushing a savagely grinning Clint away into the kitchen. Natasha was sure Banner would Hulk out and tear the Tower apart piece by piece, but it didn’t happen. Instead Bruce locked himself away somewhere and she and Clint were in the wind the moment Tony wasn’t looking. They had two suitcases, a used car that JARVIS didn’t know about, and a handwritten list of eighteen addresses.  
   
Steve’s left messages too—all long and earnest and almost physically painful to hear. Her brain stutters in and out of listening in a strange form of self preservation, only picking out bits of _I should have handled things better_ and _So worried_ and _I know_ _we can help_. Steve hadn’t been wrong to pull Clint off the team, and no one could argue otherwise. That it was a catalyst for their departure is just an unhappy coincidence—it would have happened anyway. It just happened a bit sooner than she thought it would, and now Steve gets to blame himself for it.  
   
There’s a second batch of Steve calls, interspersed between Tony’s. _Not sure if you got my messages_ and _Bruce thinks maybe_ and _Tony’s doctor said_ and _All we want_ —.  
   
“Come get us, Steve,” she whispers to his voice, which drones on unknowingly beneath hers. “Bring Tony and Bruce and make us come back.”  
   
Clint wakes up as she’s smashing the phone to pieces, not bothering to be quiet. He watches her for a moment before retrieving his own phone, holds it out for her to destroy.

 

******* 

“I don’t want the two of you living off base together,” Phil told them, two full years after they’d bought the first house.

Clint paused dramatically, his forkful of mashed potatoes hanging in the air between his plate and his mouth. Natasha, of course, kept right on eating; Barton’s poker face was startlingly terrible when he was off duty, but not hers, never hers. Phil must’ve heard them talking, or saw one of the real estate booklets Clint always insisted on picking up, in love with his own outrage over east coast prices.

“I just think,” Phil went on in the diplomatic tone he always adopted when delivering unpleasant news, “that you both have some unhealthy tendencies that tend to exacerbate the other’s. It would be better if you keep your quarters here, where we’re all together but there’s still a little...separation. Sometimes you aren’t good for each other.”

“What do you—“ Clint started to ask, but Natasha interrrupted him smoothly.

“Don’t worry so much, Coulson. We’re staying right here.”

That was true, so there was no need for him to know that Clint and Natasha already owned three properties together and were eyeing a fourth. It wasn’t easy, getting anything past Phil Coulson, and she took great delight in doing so, in the secrets all around her, secrets even from Clint. Things they kept together, things she kept for herself. And maybe they _did_ enable each other’s self destructive behaviors a little, but that’s what Phil was for—to keep them in check just the way that he liked, to hold the balloon string so they wouldn’t float away.

They only needed one more house, and that will be enough, she thought, barely listening as Clint demanded to know “exactly _what_ unhealthy tendencies” Phil had in mind. Four safehouses would be four more than she’d ever had before, more than anyone would ever need.

She couldn’t know, at the time, that Phil was right. She couldn’t know, at the time, that their strongholds would become a bit of an obsession, and never quite turn into the reassurances that they’d hoped.

 

******

“Ice cream sounds so good right now”, he sighs, fiddling with the air vents.

It’s the first interest in food Clint has expressed in days, and Natasha nearly wrenches off the steering wheel to get to an exit, determined to find some.

There’s a festival or craft fair or something going on in the next town over, and an unhappy man in a dog costume sells them a cup and a cone. It feels great to be out of the confines of the car, and she’s desperate to walk around and stretch her legs, but takes in Clint’s pale face as she makes her way back to the park bench and doesn’t suggest it.

“Do that guy. There.” Natasha nods toward a tired looking man with a child on his shoulders, trudging behind a woman pushing a stroller that holds the toddler’s twin.

Clint clears his throat. “His life got to be too much and he longed for an affair, pining day and night for a woman at work—a sexy, brilliant, fabulous, _red haired_ woman.” He smirks and nudges her with his shoulder, in the way that makes her smile now instead of lash out. “He sent her flowers and chocolates and wooed her—“

“No one actually says ‘woo’, Clint. They just don’t.” Natasha’s eyes move up to the sky, searching for any Iron Men flying overhead. There’s nothing, and she’s both relieved and disappointed.

“He _wooed_ her,” Clint insists, overemphasizing the word and gesturing with his spoon. “Wooed the hell out of her. Wooed her till she was weak kneed and glassy eyed from the disgusting, dripping, sheer _excess_ of woo. He won her at last, and they had secret trysts whenever he could get away from his shrew of a wife and their bratty twins.”

“And then?”

Because it can’t be over; even their fanciful stories never end happily—someone always ends up getting thrown off of a roof or triggering an unexpected landmine in a Wal-Mart parking lot. Grandmothers turn out to be triple agents with cyanide cigarettes, grandfathers have shivs hidden in their high black socks.

“The girlfriend ended up pregnant. And she _also_ had twins.”

Natasha laughs, licking up the side of her cone quickly, catching a vanilla drip before it reaches her hand. “Then I guess he’ll have to start a third family to get away from the first two.”

“Nah, he’s way too tired for that.” _Clint_ looks too tired; they’ve only been here thirty minutes and have done nothing but sit, and he’s already sagging into the bench. He catches her evaluating look and scowls. “It’s just hot out,” he says defensively. “That’s all.”

“Eat your ice cream then, if you’re so hot.”

He frowns unhappily at the cardboard bowl, ice cream already melted into chocolate soup. “It tastes funny. Maybe he gave me the sugar free kind by mistake.” Natasha sighs and he says quickly, “Come on, your turn. The lady. Over there—see? The one with the little purse dog.”

“The dog is actually a bomb,” Natasha snaps back. “Boom. The end.”

They’ve been playing this game for years, and she’s tired of it suddenly. It’s as stupid as bouncing those rubber balls around—just something they’d thought up to pass the time when there had been too much of it, when there seemed to be enough to waste. Clint still wants to believe that—that there’s plenty of time, that pie and ice cream will make him happy, that a bit of paint and nailhole filler can fix everything else. He’s a fool, and maybe she’s not much better, with her secrets inside of secrets, her grim determination to outpace their problems. 

 _Sometimes you aren’t good for each other,_  Phil had said, and as always, he was right. 

 

*******

When they get to the blue house they make love, more out of a sad nostalgia than any real desire. Afterwards Clint’s breathing is wheezy and labored and he disappears to hide in the bathroom while Natasha pulls on her clothes regretfully, feeling lonelier than she ever has.

Their short lived romantic fling had been in full bloom when they bought this place, a sweet, stolen season that never came again, at least never quite in the same way. The master bedroom is actually upstairs but they had never made it that far before tearing each other’s clothes off, and this smaller downstairs bedroom has been “theirs” ever since. She’s always equated the blue house with happiness, with the two of them at their best, no longer jockeying for power but full partners at last.

Now the blankets smell musty and unpleasant, and there are cracks spidering all over the bedroom ceiling.

Clint cleans the kitchen, sweeping dust and dead bugs under the stove for someone else to deal with.

Natasha turns on the faucets. The first few minutes of water are as murky and brown here as they have been everywhere else.

 

*******

Natasha’s eyes snap open and she throws her right arm out instinctively to feel for Clint, but she already knows he isn’t there; can hear him throwing up in the distance. He’s in the upstairs bathroom, the furthest one away. Trying not to wake her, trying to hide the fact that he’s puking again—a combination of attempted chivalry and that hands-over-the-eyes, head-in-the-sand avoidant behavior he’s famous for.

The respite is really and truly over now; their grand escape hadn’t been a magic that cured him. Not that she ever thought it would—but she’d hoped for it, maybe. As Phil always liked to say, none of them believed in miracles, but prayed for them anyway.

Clint creeps back to bed a few minutes later, shivering and smelling overwhelmingly of mouthwash, and Natasha waits till he’s settled before drawing up behind him. She walks her fingers up his backbone, which sticks out much more than it should, much more than it had when they left New York.

 _We used to count ribs and bandage each other’s bleeding toes_. They’d been bundled away in this very bed, arms and legs wrapped up around one another, when she whispered her secrets. Clint is the only person she’s ever told about that part of the Red Room, about the ballet and her dreams and nightmares and how they were all twisted to become one and the same. _Those were the only gentle touches that any of us ever had._

A choked sob escapes before she even knows it’s coming, and she claps her hand over her mouth, already too late.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly, his voice heavy with exhaustion and a useless, misplaced guilt, and her body convulses again in an attempt to stop the collapse that seems so inevitable.

“Don’t be stupid. You can’t help it.” She doesn’t sound as strong as she would like, but the words are right at least. She’s the Black Widow, and people count on that, count on her to _be_ that, all the time. Especially now, when he’s weak and needs her to be even stronger still. “Didn’t the doctor give you medicine, for Christ’s sake?” Her voice is too loud this time, too harsh.

He doesn’t answer for a moment, then “It doesn’t work.”

“Take it anyway!” she almost screams, and Clint sighs and rolls off the bed, getting up too slowly, moving like an old man. Natasha clenches her fists and stares at those cracks in the ceiling, somehow a sign of their mutual failure, something strong that fractured and broke when no one was looking.

He digs around in his suitcase and produces several orange bottles, takes them into the hall bathroom. Maybe swallowing pills will make him nauseous again. She doesn’t quite care, because like Bruce she’s suddenly angry. Clint isn’t trying at all, not eating or drinking enough water or even doing something as simple as taking a pill—maybe he’s right and they don’t help, but it’s still something he can do, a token bit of effort, for her sake if not his own.

Natasha hears the sink running and wipes at her face angrily. Here they are, her first genuine tears in years, and there’s nary a SHIELD shrink around to make note of them.

Clint tosses the pill bottles onto the nightstand before laying back down with a groan. There’s no reason for him to be breathing so hard from so small a task, but he is, and Natasha slows her own breathing, hoping he’ll somehow follow suit.

“The ceiling in here looks like crap,” she says finally. Her voice sounds normal again.

“Yeah.” His is rough from vomiting and fatigue.

“This house used to be so nice, but not anymore.”

He scrubs his hand across his face. “Houses are a lot of upkeep. Someone’s got to...people need to actually _live_ in them. To keep watch. Fix stuff right when it starts to crack, before it gets too bad.”

They own eighteen safe houses and all of them are like this, with chipping paint and broken air conditioners, wasps’ nests and cracked ceilings. All these hidden places they had prepared to protect themselves are falling apart and fading now, and the disaster that finally came is nothing they can shore up against.

 

*******

“I don’t know what all of this is supposed to mean,” he says, frowning as she lays out her collection, piece by piece, into the open space between them.

Natasha could pretend not to understand, could claim that she just hoped they’d look at these together and reminisce. She could pretend that there wasn’t an air of finality to all this, to everything laid out this way on a bed they’ve long shared, tiny testaments to their life together. But there isn’t any point to playing those sort of games anymore.

“They’re things that are mine. I could keep things, if they’re small enough—I could hide them away and no one was ever the wiser.” Not that anyone would care, even if they _did_ know, because most of this, objectively, is junk. But it all means something to her.

A ticket stub to a movie that made Coulson laugh out loud. A receipt for green high heels—the first thing she’d bought in America for no practical purpose, but only because she wanted them. The counselor’s pen. A half finished drawing of Bruce laughing that Steve crumpled up in frustration.

Clint recognizes most of these things and can probably guess at the stories behind the rest. He smiles at the Riverdance ticket, bounces the rubber ball lightly in his palm. His hand hovers uncertainly over a piece of plastic and doesn’t pick it up;he looks over at her instead, eyes questioning.

“Budapest,” she confirms. She’d cut off his hospital bracelet when they left and stuck it in her pocket, both for security reasons and in private celebration of the fact that he was _alive alive alive alive._

“What a shitshow,” Clint whispers automatically, Team Delta’s official callback to any reference to that most hated of cities. He picks the bracelet up and loops it around his wrist, pinching the ends together with his thumb and forefinger. “So. What do you think?” he asks hollowly. “Does it look good on me?”

“No.”

He hums in agreement and lets it flutter back down to the bed. “Then why do you want to go back to that? Why do you want to see me that way?”

She wanted this, had made what—for them, at least—is a bold and aggressive move to force them forward, but now that the moment is here Natasha is terrified, not wanting for either of them to be made so vulnerable. Phil had always taken care of that, had known the right words to bridge all the gaps between them—but now he’s gone and only they remain to try and sort life out. It can be done; they can do _anything_ they have to, when there’s no other choice. They can push through this the same way that they can run on broken feet and dig bullets out of their own flesh; they can do terrible and amazing things when there’s no other choice.

“I want you to _try_.” Her voice cracks a little on the last word, and she tips her chin up defiantly. 

“I _did_ try. I did everything they said and it didn’t work.” Clint wipes his hand across his eyes, and Natasha so hates the defeat in the gesture that she grabs his hand so he can’t do it again.

“Once. You tried _once_. Jesus, Hawkeye, when you shoot and miss you don’t give up. You fucking _try_ _again_.”

“The hospital made it worse,” Clint insists, and he’s finally getting mad, his skin flushed, making him look more alive and _there_ than he has in weeks. “Way worse.”

“Then we look for something else. Bruce thought that—“

“Bruce was just _guessing_ ,” he snaps, gesturing angrily and sending half a dozen things tumbling down the bed. “Just hypothesizing. He and Tony had a grand old time, fucking around with their stupid theories and their tests and their ‘gee, maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that, oops, no, maybe it’s some other fucking thing’, when _I_ was the one that had to—“

“Don’t you _dare_ suggest they enjoyed that,” she interrupts, snatching up her treasures where they’ve scattered, putting them back in her suitcase. “They were tearing themselves to pieces over you, and probably still are.”

“It was my choice. You said it was. _All_ of you said. You don’t get to take a promise back just because I didn’t choose the way _you_ wanted.”

That was exactly what the team had done; their encouraging support turning to shocked disbelief when Clint refused to go back to the hospital, when he refused their tests. Natasha alone had been faithful, but she’s not so sure anymore that she wasn’t just as cruel by enabling his escape. Natasha’s always been the smarter one, the stronger one, but Clint has always been the heart. He’s driven their partnership and friendship, always known the best direction, the proper course. She’s trusted him and it’s always turned out right, until now. 

“Look,” Natasha says, “if I could have only one person in my life, I’d choose you. Every time. Fighting, laughing, living, dying—I’ll do it all with you. Maybe that’s love—I don’t know enough about it to be sure, but I _think_ it is. I want you to choose me back, and choose the family we’ve found.”

Clint doesn’t say anything, and the silence spins out long, too long, and she won’t be the one to break it. Not this time. She’s not sure what she expected him to say to her declaration, but it’s certainly not, “You manipulative _bitch_.”

“Clint.” She puts her hand around his wrist and he immediately pulls away.

“Don’t turn this into something about _you_.”

“You need to decide if this family—“ Natasha gestures vaguely, “— _thing_ that we’ve had going on between us, and then with the team, for all these years is real. I’m not the only one who loves you anymore. You need to decide if you can be brave enough to stay even when you’re scared, if you can trust that we still need you even when you can’t fight beside us.” Natasha reaches for him again, and this time he allows it. “And I need to decide if I’m brave enough to stay with them when I don’t have you at my back. If I’m brave enough to stand beside you when you can’t stand at all.”

“Are you?” Clint’s voice is low, half afraid of the answer, but he smiles a little.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” Natasha pulls at his arm until he shuffles forward enough for them to wrap themselves around one another, just as they’ve always done in the blue house. “It’s not too late for us,” she whispers into the hollow of his throat. “Look how far we’ve come, you and I together. That means something, doesn’t it? It means that Phil wasn’t wrong. Maybe it takes a hell of a long time, but we _can_ be fixed. So maybe we can be saved, too. Maybe we can save each other.”

“I never believed that,” he says, fingers curling into her hair. “Not really. But Phil always did. And now you, too.”

“Clint, we can be scared. We just have to be brave, too.”

“Alright,” he says finally. “Alright.”

 

*******

When Iron Man kicks in the front door the next morning, Clint lets out a high pitched yelp of surprise as Natasha dives for weapons that don’t exist, feet tangling in her bathrobe and ending up sprawled on the floor in front of him. It’s not exactly their best moment.

“Surprise, motherfuckers!” Tony announces dramatically, Steve and Bruce peeking out from behind him.

 

*******

There’s just enough coffee left for half a cup each, and they sit around the kitchen table awkwardly with mismatched mugs. There are only four chairs, so Tony jumps up on the nearest counter, his legs swinging with counterfeit ease.

“Nice place,” Steve says politely.

“The bedroom ceiling is cracked,” Natasha admits, and shoots Tony a dark look to cover the giddy relief she’s felt from the moment he appeared. “And _someone_ broke our front door.”

“There are also four million centipedes in the basement,” Clint adds, grinning at her sharp look of horror. Nastasha isn’t exactly _afraid_ of centipedes, but she’d gladly spend the rest of her life without any in her presence. “Yeah. Sorry. I wasn’t going to tell you.“

“Well, there aren’t any bugs at _home_.” That settles everything, as far as Tony is concerned.

“Nope,” Bruce agrees, “and the ceilings are perfect and every door works. We want you to come back. It can be...however you need it to be. Just, both of you, please come back.”

 

*******

Tony sits beside Clint, drumming his feet in obnoxious excitement against the back of Natasha’s seat. She watches the billboards and Steve drives. So does Bruce, alone in the car that brought he and Tony and Steve to the blue house. Everyone had put a gentle kibosh on Clint’s suggestion of roadtripping home; they’ll leave the rental car at the airport and Bruce will drive Natasha’s back to New York. The Hulk isn’t a fan of avoidable air travel, no matter how luxurious Stark can make it.

Tony grins and nods toward the car pacing them on the right. “Hey, Cuckoo Bird, do you see what I see?”

Clint’s eyes flicker over and narrow immediately; there is no car he hates more than the Honda Element. He goes on soulful and furious diatribes whenever he has the misfortune to spot one—cursing the car’s creator, the person driving it, the institution that financed the purchase, the mothers of everyone involved, and God Himself for letting such a monstrosity be born into the world. “ _Yes_ ,” he snarls through gritted teeth. “One of those...effing... _douche wagons_!”

“Flagship vehicle of the asshole army,” Tony says solemnly, and winks when Natasha’s eyes meet his in the rearview mirror.

“Any person that drives an Element should do the world a favor and—“ Clint cuts the thought off with a sudden gasp. “It’s _BANNER_!” he cries in horror, and even Steve has to chuckle at his outrage. “Driving a goddamned canary yellow, boxy piece of—!”  

Clint waves in frantic anger, and Bruce somehow catches sight the motion and looks over, waves back with a perplexed smile as he pulls ahead of them a little. “He doesn’t even realize—oh dear God!” Clint’s in full fury now, half appalled, half exalted, practically convulsing in his seat. “The window. The. Back. Fucking. _Window_!”

Natasha cranes her neck to see, and laughs out loud at the cheerful sticker family—one stick woman and five stick men, one of them colored in green, another with a black sharpie beard—that someone has plastered onto the rental car. The mastermind is pretty obvious from the absolute glee on Tony’s face.

Maybe Clint will be better now, with all of them to fuss over him and make him take vitamins and naps and all the medicines the doctors push. Maybe the odds are bad, but maybe they’ll be improved with some of Stark’s disgusting green smoothies and Steve’s faith, with Bruce’s herbal teas and determined chemistry. Maybe. It’s a lot of hope to hang on one word, but it’s enough. For today it’s enough.

 


End file.
